He jumped. “What? What in hell’s the matter with you, woman?” Then he also saw the light, leaped from the bed, took his musket from the corner, and threw open the door. One end of the barn was in flames, and there was the dim outline of two mounted horsemen on the edge of the trees, a hundred yards from the barn. Elijah looked closely, and could see another man just behind the barn, in the small corral where his two horses were moving nervously. He leveled his rifle and fired at the figure, but was so careful not to hit his own livestock that he knew the bullet had overshot its mark. While he reloaded, all the men disappeared beyond the barn and into the woods, and then Elijah ran to the corral and opened the gate, knowing that his freed horses would not move far from the cabin. It was too late to save the barn and the hay, fodder, and ear corn—all that he had saved from a year of hard work in the fields. All he could do was curse bitterly.

He knew, even without having seen them clearly, that the thieves and arsonists were the damned Cherokees, and he shouldn’t have been surprised by this tragedy. Last week, he had been dragging the last of the ear corn home on a sled from his most distant field when a group of four Indians emerged silently from the forest, sat on their horses for a few moments, rode forward, and then dismounted so as to intercept him as he moved toward the house and barn. Elijah dropped the horse’s reins and held his gun in both hands, pointed at the ground a few feet in front of the Indians. The leader raised his right hand, palm forward, in a gesture of peace.

He recognized the group as coming from a village just five miles to the west. He had visited the village and a few others on several occasions to supplement his supply of animal skins before he went to Hillsborough to trade. Elijah was a shrewd bargainer and knew how to extract the maximum number of hides for whatever he had to exchange. His friend Aaron Hart was in almost constant contact with the natives, and Elijah absorbed and used the information he received about which village had a surplus of skins and which might be in need of supplies. He and the Indians could communicate with surprising ease, displaying their goods to one another and using sign language to make their bargaining proposals, supplemented by the few English words that the Indian traders knew. Elijah had refused to learn any of the strange-sounding Cherokee syllables, which he found distasteful.